Vies, naissances et morts des langues de l’Antiquité tardive

Late Antique Languages: Life, Birth and Death

Of all the periods in history, the end of Antiquity may well have been the one that saw the most changes in the field of languages. The spread of a new type of religion, Christianity, a religion of the book and the spoken word, gave a new dimension to multilingualism. It led to the transition of previously exclusively oral languages to written form, through the adoption of their own or borrowed alphabets, and their access to a higher cultural register. Three widely spoken languages, born before their religious role was fully developed, have found in this role their main driving force for dissemination and vitality: Syriac, Coptic and Koranic Arabic. Persian, on the other hand, had no connection with Christianity when it introduced pelhevi writing in the third century. Some ethnic, almost exclusively oral languages (Gaulish, Punic), ceased to be spoken; others only had a relatively brief existence in written form (Gotic and, less briefly, Coptic). Nabataean eventually disappeared, to be replaced by the Arabic language and script. At the same time, the languages of communication disseminated by the globalisation of the ancient world – Latin and Greek – saw their geographical area of use reduced, in the case of Latin by competition from new Romance languages derived from it. Conversely, Syriac, an Edessenian dialect of Aramaic, is not a case of a newly created alphabet, but of a language and script that enjoyed cosmopolitan success from the third century onwards, linked to the spread of Christianity. In a limited number of cases, the new powers that emerged from the migratory movements imposed their language and mode of writing: for example, ‘English’ pushed the use of ‘Britton’ to the territorial peripheries. On the other hand, the establishment of the Germanic kingdoms had little linguistic impact on the Western Roman provinces, where the evolution from provincial Latin to the Romance languages was already irreversible. Another factor in the proliferation of written languages was the general political and economic fragmentation of the ancient world, the opposite of the globalisation previously effected by the two great empires, Roman and Persian.